Gold Dust is not just a film of Iain Sinclair reading from his book Ghost Milk, beautifully accompanied by Bill Parry-Davies on Saxophone. In this 7 minute film Sinclair calls time on London’s Grand Olympic Project. He reveals another side to the Olympic landscape, one crisscrossed by trains carrying nuclear waste, siroccos of toxic dust, and other details the authorities would rather we didn’t know.

The story begins in 1901 when Marie Curie discovers radium, and the nuclear age is born. In the 63 years following, before someone decides the disposal of radioactive materials must be restrained - in those years of science, industry, and war, Britain develops nuclear power and The Bomb, while other industries are routinely using radioactive materials. Also between those years, in an industrial backwater and dumping ground in the East of London, radioactive wastes are buried.

Decades later in that same burial ground, an oubliette imprisoning waste of the early nuclear age, the Olympic gold rush begins. The 5 ringed tomb robbers have no time to lose, and show no mercy to a repository of mysterious elemental forces. Amid the poisons of industrial exploitation, the prospectors, the architects of dust, their thousand mechanical excavators, churn every inch of this sacred earth.

From their retirement bungalow high on the rocky flanks of Mount Olympus the 12 Greek gods whose home this is, cannot look away as the mortals tear asunder protective layers, their eager snouts pressed into the 2012 trough. In an unlikely alliance of brooding spirits, the ghost of Marie Curie, and the Viking god Thor, from whom the radioactive metal Thorium takes its name, are disturbed.

Have the gold diggers awoken what should have been left to sleep?

Breaking news - London 2012 has accepted sponsorship from Dow Chemicals owners of the company responsible for poisoning and killing twenty thousand people in an industrial accident in Bhopal, India. Some may see an appropriateness, or even synergy, in this choice of sponsor.

We are currently seeking funding to make a full length documentary on the issue of the radioactive contamination of the London Olympic Park.

More info at ftbs.net

I hope you enjoy our film and find it informative.
May the gods and ghosts be with you.